Off to Merseyside for Location, Location, Location (Channel 4). "Here we go again!" trills Kirstie Allsopp. Oh Kirstie, do you feel it too? For eight long years we've been trotting behind you through shabby lounges, giggling as you roll your eyes behind the backs of your boneheaded clients, simpering as you flirt with intransigent vendors, padding meekly upstairs to knock on stud walls and talk sleek en suites, while Phil leads a tour of the triple garage. It's been wonderful.

And yet, here you are, dressed in a Russian fur hat that Anna Karenina rejected as too ridiculous, cooing about your clients' "big shopping list" and how truly, this time, "it's a challenge" – and I just can't find it in me to care. Nope. Sorry. So Nicky and Gary are "the fussiest house hunters in the country"? Meh. And Gemma and Susannah, both 23, are living in student halls and looking for their first flat together? Yawn. Do a spot of Cossack dancing, Kirst, let's have some real entertainment.

It's almost as if something has happened to the property market, something so huge and so serious that all this larking about has lost its levity. Something that sours the charm of taking housing tips from the The Honourable Miss Allsopp and a chap whose property company has just gone into administration, crashing under the weight of our collective lust for sleek en suites.

Not that you would know it from this programme. Liverpool is a city with "exciting ongoing projects", says Kirstie, but "the heat has gone out of the market". You mean we're in the middle of the worst recession in 80 years, right? Repossessions soaring, mortgage credit elusive? Kirstie mutters something about "a buyers' market". Come on, Locationx3 lot. The magic has gone. We've seen the little chap behind the curtain – he's in negative equity, too.

So anyway, into this market step not only the fussiest, but pretty much the only, buyers in the country. I'd be fussy, too. Nicky and Gary are in thrall to their lofty aspirations, looking for a large three-bed, near a good school, preferably in footballers' paradise Gayton, for £350,000 . . . See – you don't really care either.

Susannah and Gemma, meanwhile, don't seem to want to buy a house together at all, every viewing crackling with competitive wills and suppressed resentments. They press on nevertheless, settling, under Gemma's steely influence, on the flat that Susanna didn't want.

Over wine, Kirstie cooing to the vendor, they manage to buy a property together without once making eye contact. And the truly puzzling thing is that at no point have their friends persuaded them of what seems by far the most sensible option. Rent.

The Cell (BBC4) is the first documentary I have watched where the presenter waggled a sample bottle of his own semen at the camera, before explaining how he had collected it. That's more like it, BBC4! Strictly speaking, Dr Adam Rutherford explained how he hadn't collected it – "as a natural product of conjugal coitus", which is how the 17th- century Dutch biologist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek said he came by his samples. "I can't make the same claims," says Dr Adam a little saucily. Yes, yes, we've more than got the picture, thanks. Nice, clean-cut Dr Adam is not the kind of chap BBC4 viewers would imagine getting up to that kind of nonsense – actually, perhaps he is exactly that kind of chap.

The programme was a pleasing enough rattle through the early history of cell biology, and the assorted pioneers – Robert Hooke, Louis Pasteur, Theodor Schwann – who nudged the baby science forward, some of them stumbling across fundamental biological truths, while at the same time believing that crocodiles are made of logs, that you can turn smelly shirts into mice, and that each sperm is really a teeny, tiny man curled up tight.

Rutherford's favourite, though, would seem to be Robert Remak, a German embryologist who, as Rutherford told it, had basically founded embryology, but had been unjustly overlooked after his friend Rudolph Virkow passed off his research on cell division as his own.

Bastard.

So that's Robert Remak, everyone. Tell your friends. Robert Remak.

The special-effects count, shall we say, was low – occasionally Rutherford was filmed through a big historical lens, turning his image upside down! But there's nothing wrong with plain vanilla telly now and then. Sometimes you just want to sit in your shabby lounge and watch something whose aspirations are reassuringly modest.